Are Birthdays Doing Too Much Work In Our Friendships?

Have you ever caught yourself on your birthday paying a little too much attention to your phone?

Noticing who texted, who posted, who sent a voice memo? What about who just “liked” your Instagram story but didn’t actually say anything? Who remembered, who didn’t, and what all of that might mean about how much they care about you.

For most of us, birthdays are one of the only times we explicitly tell our friends how much they mean to us. It’s the one day when all the evidence gets collected: did they remember, did they make an effort, did they show up in the way I hoped they would?

And if there aren’t many other moments throughout the year where we are saying these things out loud, then of course the birthday starts to feel loaded.

So in today’s episode, I’m talking about how we can build a culture inside our friendships where affirmation, appreciation, and “you matter to me” moments are not saved for one day a year. Your birthday can still be special, but it probably shouldn’t have to carry the full weight of proving where you stand in someone’s life.

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Why birthdays can start to feel like a friendship test, even when nobody wants them to be one
• Why a birthday text, card, party, or forgotten message can feel so loaded when there is not enough “you matter to me” evidence 
• What story roots have to do with birthday expectations, and why our brains write loud stories about it
• How voice memos, shared notes, and friendship check-ins can help build a culture of affirmation beyond birthdays

Resources & Links

Episode 12: Digging Into the 3 Types of Friendship Roots

Episode 37: You Don’t Need to Understand People to Accept Them

Episode 70: Separating Our Own Friendship Beliefs from Our Children’s with Pam Howard

Episode 179: What Is Friendship Culture? (And How to Shift it Without Blowing Everything Up)

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Transcript

Podcast Intro/Outro: 0:00

All right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship

Alex Alexander: 0:52

I'm going to give you a couple scenarios here, and I want you to think about whether you've experienced either one of them, the first one has to do with your own birthday. Have you ever caught yourself on your birthday just watching your phone, refreshing it, paying attention to who texted you and noticing who didn't? Maybe who posted something versus someone who sent a voice memo or a DM or just liked a post you posted about doing something for your own birthday, like you posted maybe a birthday brunch, you went out to with somebody, and you notice that somebody just like double tapped it, but they didn't actually send you a message, and definitely noticing who did not do anything at all, and then spending just so much mental energy on what that means for your friendship. Do they care about me? Do they not care about me? When's last time I felt like they cared about this friendship? And maybe, maybe not. You feel a little embarrassed that you care this much. You start telling yourself, "Like I'm a grown adult. Why am I so obsessed with what is happening on my birthday? But there's something about your birthday that just gets to you. And maybe you've thought to yourself, you know, like I should lower the bar. I should plan my own party. I should make sure that I'm doing what I want to do on my birthday. But deep down, you still just have this sinking feeling that something feels off to you. Do these people appreciate you? Do they love you? Do they care about you? What does it say if they don't even remember your birthday, and then on the flip side, maybe you feel a lot of pressure about other people's birthdays. I'm recording this episode. I just went out to dinner with a friend. I brought up the episode I'm releasing today, and her immediate story was like, "Oh my gosh, the number of times I felt like I'm not doing enough for my friends-that you know-that girls' group text being like,"Hey, August birthdays. When are we picking a date? And maybe you can't really make it to any of the dates that are offered, and you feel awful, and then you feel like you have to make up for it, like what are you gonna do to show that you do care about these people? Are you gonna write a long card? Are you gonna send them flowers? You gonna drop off coffee? Are you going to text them and be like,"Hey, I can't make it to this month's birthday dinner, but we should get lunch. Are you available any of these weeks? I can make that work because I want to celebrate your birthday. Maybe you have some newer friends. This got brought up too, like a newer group of mom friends, and you maybe don't even really know their birthdays. You've only known them for a year or two, but now you're expected to know somebody's birthday. Somebody starts off in the group chat being like, happy birthday, Monica, and everybody chimes in, but you had no idea it was Monica's birthday, and now you feel like if you forget somebody in that group message's birthday, oh man, like that's awkward. If we forget Susie's birthday in December, oh, how terrible! Or maybe you feel like you just have a friend you really love. You write them a card every year on their birthday, and it's got to be good, right? Because this is like the one time a year you tell them how much you care about them, and how do you ever encapsulate that into a card? Now, at this point, you might be like, Alex, you have just overthought all of this. I guess maybe I definitely have thought about this a lot recently. But

here's what I've come to: 4:49

I don't think that the birthday itself is the problem. I don't think that whether you plan a big party or you decide that it's going to be a low key year and you're convinced. You're okay with it. I don't think that telling yourself like, "Oh, I really wish they would have called, but I guess the text message is fine. I don't think the birthday, the way you celebrate, and the way people reach out to you is actually the problem. I think the problem is that the birthday is just doing too much work in our friendships. Here's something that stopped me cold in my tracks in a recent conversation. I was on a discovery call with someone, and she said something that I hadn't exactly been able to put into words. I've obviously been thinking about birthdays and the weight they carry in our friendships a lot, but I couldn't quite pin it down, and she put it so simply. We'll get to who she is at the end of this episode because she does have her own episode coming up, and it's a great one. But what she said to me is, you know, a marriage has at least seven celebrations built in around it, right? We have an engagement party, a bachelor/bachelorette, a wedding shower, a rehearsal dinner, the wedding, a day-after brunch, and then you have an anniversary every single year, and maybe you also have a vow renewal or two vow renewals. Maybe go on an annual trip. We have so many celebrations and milestones around a marriage. And then she looked at me, and she said, "But what do we do to celebrate our friendships? And she just looked at me, and she goes, "Birthdays. I was like,"You know what, Jennifer, you are right. Birthdays-that's it. That's like the one time that most of us tell our friends, either verbally, in writing, in a card, at a toast, or just in the actions that we take, how much they mean to us. For most of us, that kind of like proof that we care about each other, it all hangs on our birthday. And then, because everybody's busy and the world is a lot, and people are in different seasons of life, maybe at a certain point, a lot of us adults. We tell ourselves, well, you know, we just can't show up the same way we used to. I guess I'll just have to accept less, right? I have to accept just a quick happy birthday text message when these friends used to celebrate me and have a dinner out or a full weekend away or just a couple nights that we would hang out and like play games and have a backyard barbecue, go out in the boat, whatever it is, and then the birthday itself, your friendship is not even getting kind of like this full moment, because if you're having a birthday party, you're probably sharing this celebration with family, a partner, maybe coworkers, kids, neighbors. Everyone in this person's life is there, and really, you're celebrating your friend. If it's their birthday, you're celebrating the birthday person, and you, right? If I am showing up for my friend Johnny, I'm doing everything to show him how much I care about him, but I'm not really celebrating the friendship, not really celebrating maybe the decades we have put into this relationship. Friends are just like one category in the birthday life celebration. We're all looking for words of affirmation and love and acts that show we care to celebrate us on our birthday from a variety of people. It's not just a friendship celebration, but we do definitely look at our friends, being like, "Hey, you're my people. Are you going to celebrate me today? I'll give you another example. Let's think about another milestone. Think about when somebody has a baby, there's normally maybe an announcement where we all get excited, we all text, we all message, we all call. Right? We have videos that we're posting about showing everyone's reaction. Then we maybe have a baby shower where everybody gets together. Then we got the meal train. Got to get everyone together for that first birthday party to celebrate the parents making it their first full year as parents. Absolutely agree with that milestone. And then as parents, we have school milestones. We have graduation, where we get to celebrate the fact that we have gone through this journey of being parents, and now they are heading out into the world, into a job or college. Then we have a college graduation, and eventually we maybe have your kid's wedding where you invite your friends and your family and your people. All of those are moments where somebody looks at the parents and the kid and. Say wow! What a beautiful relationship. Let's celebrate this parent-child relationship, and the whole community shows up multiple stages across this 20-plus year span. So, what does friendship get? Because I would argue that some of our friends, especially, are female friendships, but I don't want to count men out, but especially from women, I hear, well, they didn't show up for my birthday, and I feel a certain type of way about it, and I am here to say, I guess it makes sense because really, that is the one day a year that we feel like we should get some sort of affirmation from our friends about how much they care about us, and quite frankly, it's the one person-the birthday girl or birthday guy, the birthday person. It's really about them. It's not even necessarily about celebrating this friendship that maybe it's held us together for three decades at this point. You know, maybe it's gotten us through breakups and job changes and financial hardships, medical moments. We do a lot for our friends, and yet, when is the moment that we tell each other how much we care? For most people, quite frankly, it's at somebody's funeral, and our friend doesn't actually get to hear how much they matter. So, since these are some of our most vital, most important relationships, when you don't have a lot of moments or any moments really throughout the year where your friends are explicitly telling you that you matter to them, you start to watch for evidence in the ways they act, the ways they let you in, and if you aren't seeing a lot of that, maybe you're not noticing it. Then the birthday really becomes the one place, the one moment in the year where you collect evidence of how much your friend cares about you. Did they remember? Did they make an effort? What does the effort level they say about how much they actually care about you? And if you've heard me talk about my roots of friendship framework, then you might be listening to this and realizing that this really impacts our story roots. Now there are three types of roots. You can go listen to Episode 12 where I break this down. But our story roots are our beliefs and expectations about our friendship. So if you believe my friend cares about me, you're looking for evidence that they care, and you have expectations about the ways that they will show up. So if you believe my friend really cares about me, they would do anything for me. And then your friend doesn't even remember your birthday, or they don't show up at whatever level you expect them to show up, you start to question that belief. So it makes sense to me why there is so much pressure on a birthday, because when the evidence is thin, our brains take over. We write really loud stories. We start to say to ourselves, "What do they care about me? Do I matter to them? Are they showing up for me like a friend should? I think a birthday becomes a sort of test, and nobody wants it to be one, because the thing is, your friends really do probably care. It's just that the data, the evidence, isn't coming in regularly enough for you to feel secure in that, and so the birthday ends up carrying all the weight-the whole year's worth of "Do I matter to these people? lands on this one day, and that's what this episode is about. It's not about lowering your expectations of your birthday or your friendships. It's not reframing how you feel about your birthday, but asking what if we built a culture inside of our friendships where the birthday didn't carry all of the weight of affirming how much we care about each other? Before I get into what that can actually look like, I want to give you a little map of where this fits because the more I thought about it, I think there's kind of three levels because I've touched a little bit on this before, and I want to connect the dots. So if you go back to Episode 37 of the podcast, it's an episode about how to feel very not alone. It's actually an episode that I recorded on my birthday a few years ago, and this episode is really about noticing, noticing the small things that my friends already do, the text that comes at the right time, the person who remembers the thing I mentioned three weeks ago. When you notice all this little stuff, it builds this kind of... Layer of trust. I'm not questioning how much I matter to my friends. I have all these little moments of evidence that just make me feel so secure in how much I matter, and takes the pressure off my birthday. This episode is kind of a middle layer. It's not about noticing what's already there. It's about actively building a culture in your friendships where both of you are saying out loud and on purpose more than once a year how much you matter to each other. It's about not just like noticing what your friends give you, but actively saying, "Hey, I want to communicate in a way where we feel like we are sure we know how much we matter because we're saying it regularly. We're not waiting until some future date. And then there's actually a third layer, kind of a pinnacle version, a moment in time. It's not better than anything else, but a formal declaration about your friendship. And I actually have a whole episode in the works that is coming on that layer, and I'll tell you about it in a

minute. But here's the thing: 17:19

all three of these layers, however you choose to do them, you might do all three, you might do just one. I think it depends on you and on the specific friendship, and on what you both actually need, and figuring that out which of these layers requires a little self reflection and maybe a little conversation with your friends, which I think is worth doing. So, what does building this culture in your friendship actually look like? This middle layer where both of you are giving each other affirmation regularly that makes you feel more secure and you know trusting in your beliefs, and so it doesn't all hinge on your birthday. I want to give you some options because there's no right version to this. The first one be just like say it when it happens. That thing that you would write in their birthday card about how much they helped you this year, about how much you've enjoyed getting closer to them, about how much that trip or that big moment mattered to you. Instead of waiting to say it at a birthday toast or in a birthday card. The next time you sit across from your friend, or honestly call them up on the phone, tell them right there, look them dead in the eye, and be like, "Hey, that thing you did last week. I need you to know that that really mattered to me. You're one of the only people I would trust to do that, and I'm so grateful that I have you in my life. And maybe you talk to your friend about how you're going to do this. You're like, "Hey, I don't want to wait until a funeral to tell everyone how much you matter to me. I want to tell you all the time, and maybe it will inspire them to do the same. And that's what I mean by changing the culture in your friendship. Now, if you have a hard time just doing that on the spot, then maybe you come up with some sort of system. So, an idea would be saying like, "Hey, what if once a month, once a quarter, doesn't matter, whatever the right cadence is for you and your friend? What if we sent each other kind of like a regular voice note or voice memo about what mattered most to us? What did we do recently that really made the other person feel seen, feel cared for, feel loved? What if you sent them a message that was like, "Hey, I just need you to know that I'm having a really hard day, and the very first person that I thought of that could make me laugh and make me feel better is you. And I wanted you to know that I am always grateful for you listening to me, for you checking in on me, for you trying to lighten the mood, even when I'm the grumpiest person you've ever met. Just a regular voice memo every month. Make it a point to think back on the thing that mattered the most. Hey, I really appreciated that when I told you I was having a hard time, you stepped outside and you called me back. You talked to me for 20 minutes. Really made me feel like I wasn't alone in my problem, and I was just spiraling before you, but knowing I have you really matters to me. Maybe you create a shared note on your phone. Maybe whenever you think of something, you add it into that note. Things you're grateful for about the friendships, things you noticed, things you want to say before you forget them, and it just becomes this running record of what your friendship actually means to both of you. Maybe you have an annual friendship conversation, just a dedicated moment. Maybe it's a trip or a dinner or a phone call, where you actually say the things. What was the most impactful thing you did for each other this year.? You did for each other this year.What was the specialist moment? What felt like it stretched your friendship in a good way, and you now feel closer? What does this friendship mean to you? And sure, you could do that around a birthday and make that the tradition, or you could just pick any other random day that works for you this year, and that becomes a new normal in your friendship, right? That's the friendship culture, the norm. The expectation is that every year you spend a little time reflecting on the ways that this friendship matters to you. That every month you send each other a little voice memo reminding each other how much you matter? That couple times a week you're adding something to this shared note, so that any time you're unsure of how much you matter to this friend, you can open up that note and scroll through it, and remember just how important you are. The format doesn't matter. What matters is that you're not just leaving all of this to one day a year, and when you start doing this, when you start building this into your friendship, I think something shifts because the birthday stops being this test. It's just a birthday. Now, I mentioned earlier, kind of this testimony, this pinnacle version, this final moment, a big declaration, and I do have a very interesting outside the box episode coming up, talking about the idea of having some sort of like a commitment ceremony with your friends, spending some time taking pictures, writing down how much you mean to each other, actually standing in front of each other, sitting across from each other, and reading that out loud-it's a very, very interesting episode. One that'll really make you think about how often you're telling your friends what they really mean to you. So be on the lookout for that in the catalog. And if you're listening to this after I've released the episode, you'll find it in the show notes below. I'm not sure how soon it's coming out. We got to record it first, but soon it'll be out soon. Here's what I want

to leave you with: 23:15

your birthday, especially for women, for women who are showing up for everybody else, who are putting everybody else first, who are doing the emotional and mental labor of considering other people. I get why your birthday is maybe the one day a year that you want to be considered, that you want to be celebrated, that you want to be the priority, that you want to hear how all the work you do all year long impacts everybody else that they love you too, they care about you, they want to prioritize you, that they want you to feel just as special as you make everyone else feel. But I also think that if you're a woman or a man, but especially a woman, and you are feeling all this pressure that you're just waiting for your one day a year? Then I'm here to tell you, you deserve more than one day. And sure, that may not come as like a girls' trip every quarter where you can all sit around and tell each other, but that doesn't mean you can't tell each other via a voice memo, a text thread, a shared note, a phone call-you can do this regularly. This can just become a norm that you get the flowers, quite frankly, that you deserve for how hard you are working to support your friendships. And to all my men out there, how often are you in a culture of affirmation in your friendships? How often are you telling each other how much you love each other and you care? Do you do that on birthdays? Do you do it all at all? lBecause it might feel like a lot to go and sit across from each other and really pour it out and tell each other how much you care, and if you want to do that, actually another amazing episode. I hadn't put this in my outline for this episode. Is the episode about interviewing your people with Chris Burnett? I want to say it's Episode 70. We will link it in the show notes. That actually might be a great way to build this into your friendships, in a way that feels less intense. If this is not the culture of your friendships, and if you're like Alex, what is friendship culture? You should also go ahead to the show notes. I have an entire episode about friendship culture, the norms in our friendship, and I will link it there. I can't remember the episode number; it's a pretty recent one, but you'll find the link. The whole point of this being, we can create a culture in our friendships where we are sprinkling in the affirmation, the acknowledgement. Of how much we matter to each other, and we don't need to save it for one day. We can spread it out, and that's quite frankly what I think we should all be doing. We shouldn't be saving it for birthdays. We shouldn't be saving it for funerals. We shouldn't be saving it for later. Just lay it out now, because if these people matter to us, we should be saying it more regularly, and not just on their birthday. Because if the birthday has been carrying all that weight, I don't really know that that's a friendship problem. I think that's a structure problem, and structure is actually something you can change. With that, I'll see you next week.

Alex Alexander [Narration]: 26:51

Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you. But don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message. I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram. My handle, @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting. And use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye. I'll be back with a new episode next week.